Recording laws
Recording a meeting is legal in most places, with rules worth knowing.
Aloe Scribe is a recording tool, and recording laws depend on where you and the other participants are. Running locally does not change those rules. This page is a plain-language map with links to the authoritative sources, so you can check your own situation.
United States: consent rules are set state by state
Federal law and the majority of states follow one-party consent: you may record a conversation you are part of. Around a dozen states require the consent of everyone in the conversation, including California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. When participants are in different states, careful practice is to follow the strictest state on the call.
The authoritative starting points:
- The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, state-by-state recording guide. The canonical reference, maintained by media lawyers.
- Justia's 50-state survey of recording laws, with citations to each statute.
- The federal wiretap statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2511, the one-party baseline.
Outside the US
In the European Union, a meeting recording that contains personal data falls under the GDPR's lawful-basis rules, usually satisfied by consent or by legitimate interest with clear disclosure. The United Kingdom mirrors this under UK GDPR. In Canada, PIPEDA governs recordings made in commercial contexts. The common thread everywhere: tell people you are recording.
Voice fingerprints and biometric laws
Aloe Scribe's speaker identification can keep small mathematical voice fingerprints so it recognizes the same colleague across meetings. Voiceprints are biometric identifiers under laws like Illinois BIPA and Texas and Washington equivalents, which restrict companies that collect biometric data.
Our architecture takes a clear position here: the fingerprints are created by you, stored only on your machine, and never transmitted anywhere. We never receive, possess, or process them, the way a camera maker never possesses your photographs. There is no vendor database of anyone's voice. You can delete them at any time by deleting the file on your own disk.
Practical guidance
Disclose that you are recording where the law, your industry, or plain courtesy calls for it, the same as with any recorder. In practice most meeting platforms have normalized this: a spoken "I'm taking notes with a transcription tool" at the start covers both trust and, in one-party states, more than the law requires. In all-party states and regulated industries, get the yes before you press record.
Because Aloe Scribe never joins the call and stores everything on your machine, the questions cloud tools add on top of recording law, where the audio goes, who the processor is, what the vendor retains, simply do not arise. The recording decision, and its legal weight, stays entirely with you. See the security page for the full architecture.